


Landscape with the Quiet of Sky

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Childhood Friends, Genocide, I seem to love those pastures of red grass as much as the Master does, Other, Regeneration, Spoilers for Episode: s12e01-02 Spyfall, also there might be a rock, basically the usual Doctor/Master themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:33:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22180111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: Where there's the Doctor, there's hope. Eventually.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 168





	Landscape with the Quiet of Sky

They’d played in this field as children. Meadow, dew-sweet as one sun and then the other brought dawn onto the mountain, it warmed with their skin, soaked their robes, whispered in the morning air’s rising pressure differential like a song woven into their hearts. They strained their eyes against the light as the stars receded into the sunrise, the grass grey, pink, finally ruby, rosy-rich with the flush of careful cultivation. 

It was a lush lawn in a steep desert, the meticulous work of millennia, and he had loved it since infancy, been sustained by it, wandered along its mild incline, happy there as he was nowhere else, happier there alone, happiest still when he brought his friend to share in the horizon, and found that his friend loved it as much as he did. So he loved his friend for it. 

Now... 

But, no, not yet.

They’d kissed in this field. They’d fought in this field. Under the sward lay the bones of their youth’s secrets, close-grazed and long since returned to soil. 

So many times at his lowest he had come home in his mind to the comfort of the familiar landscape. It wasn’t strange that the Master, dying, would drag herself back to her parkland, her pasture, where she could lie looking at the constellations they had mapped and named together when their teachers would give the stars only navigational coordinates and reference numbers. 

If nothing else is her due, this, at least, must be. Otherwise, maybe the Doctor was right, who had wanted her to be all the things she wasn’t, or her younger self, who had wanted her to die. 

Just one more minute. Just wait.

There are no constellations in a pocket universe. She stares up into the dark sky until lights spark in her vision anyway. 

_Your stars, Doctor._

The pinpricks expand. The stars brighten. Soon, they’ll sear the eye. Soon, they’ll consume the sky, and her with it. Missy has brought her own light show, a fitting display, such fire and fusion, like the devastation she's seen on the edges of her vision all her life. 

The sound reaches her a heartsbeat later, no more delayed than thunder. The Citadel, though unseen behind a craggy ridge, isn't so far away. 

“Boom,” she echoes, very quiet because the Doctor isn't around to hear. 

Then the heat arrives, and the concussion, and, she imagines, the last screams of the Time Lords, moments before her own. 

…

This is how it ends, or was supposed to. When the Master opens his new eyes, not dead after all, he is understandably upset. The beloved grass has been flattened, the very rock beneath it burnt. The first thing he ever feels is the crumbling dissolution of carbonised stalks beneath his palms. The reddish black powder clings to his skin when he lifts his hands to his face. 

It is appallingly quiet. 

He rubs the remains of the field across his cheeks and his mouth and his eyelids. He streaks his forehead with the ash of Gallifrey. 

“There,” he says to the no one who is there. “Now I know how it feels.”

Not godlike, not exactly. 

He staggers to his feet. Just as well that the dress he’d arrived in is falling from his frame. It wouldn't have fit him anyway. Bits of the outfit persist, and in one bedraggled pocket he finds his means of escape. If he wants it. 

The taste in his mouth makes him retch, suddenly, dry-gagging towards the ground until he loses his footing and he’s on his knees, spitting up bile. When he looks up again, his eyes are wet, and yet he forces himself to survey his domain. It’s still his inheritance. It’s still his home. 

_He still_ cares _!_

There are no birds, no insects, no susurrating trees, no hum of thought punctilious and busy in the background. Slivers of silver leaf lie curled where they fell. The only sound, when it comes, is the rumble and crack of something collapsing in the distance. 

He presses on. It doesn’t take him long to summit the range of peaks that shelter the estate from the capital. The Master has turned his planet into a wasteland, but his planet has regenerated his body, blasted it with life when he least wants it, for once. He’s full of vigour and momentum and the beginnings of a hysteria that pulls at his face and punches out from behind his eyes. 

At the crest he braces his hand against a rock, still hot with residual radiation. The city is shrouded in smoke. The great sphere is broken open, shattered, slag. He feels only recognition, bitter familiarity. The pattern of destruction will always bear his mark, as unmistakeable as a genetic print. 

This is what he was made for. This is what he is. 

“The Doctor should see this.”

He breaks off a smouldering stone, throws it at the ruins below. 

The Doctor should know.

...

He makes her find out for herself. When she’s worked it out, finally, he brings her back to the beginning. The fires have burnt to cinders. But they’re not here to look at those. They turn away from the ruined city, and make their way along the path they used to take as children. The dead land greets them, its brittleness an accusation.

The wide-open view shows the same empty sky. The sky is a mirror to the ground around them. The Doctor has her hands in her pockets, her expression one of grim dismay. 

The Master sneers. “Don’t look at me like that. When _you_ did it, there was nothing left to visit.”

“Isn’t this worse?” she says. “It used to be beautiful here.”

“It’s still beautiful.”

The Doctor lets this fiction hang in the air. There’s pity under her silence. 

“If it hadn’t been for you,” the Master laughs at last, a little too sharp, “I would never have done this. Did you know that? You must know it.”

“How do you mean?” she asks, uncertain.

He’s very deliberate with his syllables. “Your lessons. The principles you taught me. All the remorse you made me feel. Then this.”

The Master bangs his fists against his hearts. “'Who do I die as?' you told me to ask myself. 'Who am I?' Then I found out...just how apt a question it really was.”

The Doctor shakes her head. Her hair slips over her face, a curtain, too convenient. 

But he isn't going to let her off. “You agree it was necessary.”

“Yes. No!” The Doctor frowns. “You don’t answer betrayal with betrayal.”

“It felt good.”

“That’s a _lie_.” 

“It did.” A smile flirts with his lips. “When they were dying, when our whole world was one wave of fire, and it was filling me with life, forcing life into me against my will, it felt like—”

“Stop it.”

The Doctor hunches over, hiding, her eyes low, her back tight. The Master never thought he’d see the Doctor on this meadow again. He’d like to shove her down onto it. He’d like to make her taste the poisoned sod, and ask her what she thinks of his stewardship.

“Ohhh, look!” she exclaims abruptly, darting for the ground, surprising him, disrupting his thoughts. “Look, look at this!”

“What?”

She reaches for the hem of his coat, tugs at it until he’s crouching down beside her, the coat sweeping dry dust into the air. 

The Master draws a shaking breath. Maybe, this taste is sweet. Maybe the sweetness is hope. He closes his eyes against his pain, and only opens them again when the Doctor lays her hand on his shoulder. 

There’s a clump of clover growing amidst the dead grass. It’s pushed pale, orange blossoms through the ashes, its blushing leaves reaching for the suns, and the sky.


End file.
